South Street

The brilliant, heartfelt debut from one of America’s foremost novelists of Black lives.

South Street, Philadelphia. The 1970s: A once-vibrant Black neighborhood, now threatened by gentrification but still a community. At Lightnin’ Ed’s Bar & Grill, working men and winos watch as the Phillies lose again. A few blocks east, at The Word of Life, preachers prance to fill the plate but one still soothes the soul. Further east, at the Elysium Hotel, a pimp and numbers runner plans violence in response to a threat from “organized” competition. Above it all, in apartments unfit for habitation, Black folk live, love, even prosper.

Enter Adlai Stevenson Brown, a Black poet in search of “authenticity” and his own identity. But South Street is more complex than he—or any outsider—would expect. He can hear, glimpse, taste, even touch, but South Street refuses to be reduced to rhyme. And its dangers are real.

With riotous humor, sharp insight, and a poet’s ear, David Bradley captures a vanished era in a neighborhood vibrating with life, history and contradictions.